Charles Dickens and the

Portrait of Victorian England

 In the Victorian England children started to work in very early age – mainly in agriculture
working children at the age of five or six were not an exception. Course of the Industrial
Revolution did not restrict the child labour on any count; on the contrary the Industrial
Revolution even intensified it.
 Demand for the child labour rose with the expanding factories – specific factory working
positions actually were tailor-made for children, for example work on places with small
space, openings easily penetrable with a children arm and so on.
 The major part of children employed in factories worked in textile mills. There was no
need to manipulate with heavy objects; therefore children were perfectly suitable for
such work.
 The working hours of children were not different from the adults´ working hours – it
usually lasted for twelve hours.
 Except for the work in factories children were used in other types of work too. Chimney
sweeping was very common type of children work.
 Children usually worked there under the supervision of an adult worker who took
advantage of their small stature for cleaning the chimneys.
 Children fitted into chimneys with their whole body which meant that they saved up the
exhausting physical work from the adult worker.
 Work in coal mines was another typical children job. In this work children were favoured
for their small stature too
 Until the end of the 19th century the child labour in Great Britain was not regulated by
any laws.
 In the beginning of the Victorian era, in year 1802 the first law concerning child labour
was released – the Factory Act, but it focused predominantly on working children –
orphans.
 Many factories made deals with orphanages; they took children from these institutions
as soon as they reached the age of seven.
 According to the Factory Act of 1802 these children could work maximum of twelve
hours a day and the factory owner was under an obligation to provide them with basic
education.
 Some children worked out of their homes too – outside on the streets. Boys could make
some extra money there by sweeping up the streets, holding horses or delivering
messages; girls were also sweeping up the streets or they were selling flowers and
matches.
 The child labour enabled children to become totally independent of parents around the
age of fifteen. So such age was the most frequent age of children in Victorian England
leaving their parents and founding their own homes.
 Child labour in Victorian era was possible mainly because of total absence of nationwide
system of education. As late as in the middle of the 19th century nearly a half of all
English inhabitants were illiterate.
The Life of Charles Dickens

 The boy called Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on the 7th of February 1812 in
Portsmouth to his parents John and Elizabeth Dickens as the second of eight children in
total.
 he was also born into the rough, unsatisfactory country where every day of a poor
inhabitant could be the last day and every fight for a bite of food could be the fight for a
bare life.
 A new person adopted very important role in Charles Dickens´ life – it was a nurse. Mary
Weller started to work for the Dickens family during their first years in Chatham.
 She became an indispensable part of home for little Charles, she provoked his passion
for reading, she broadened Charles´ horizons in many aspects of life or education and
she became Charles´ lifelong inspiration and model for the literary characters created by
him.
 An interesting aspect of the person of Mary Weller was her influence on little Charles
and also the relationship between them.
 It is oftentimes impossible to determine satisfactorily whether their mutual relationship
was positive or not.
 In some works by Charles Dickens, where the character of a nurse performs, this
character is not depicted in very affable way,
 for example in the Christmas short story called The Holly-Tree the nurse is described
as a woman with yellowish face and fish eyes.
 However, in other Dickens´ works the character of a nurse is depicted oppositely – in a
positive way that borders even with adoration.
 Such an opposite is the most obvious especially in the novel David Copperfield
where the character of the nurse is the only support for the little hero and it could be
said that she directly compensates the lack of maternal love for him.
 Charles´ mother Elizabeth gained a job for her son at Warren´s Blacking Factory.
 Charles´ job description was to stick labels on the bottles.
 The same type of work as Charles did was done there by several more boys. One of
them who came to give Charles initial training in the work was called Bob Fagin. Later
Dickens used his name in the novel Oliver Twist
 This way little Charles Dickens found himself in the same surroundings as was the one of
his children´s heroes from his later works.
 From the boy of relatively decent social status Charles became the boy who is forced to
work in a factory on the grounds of maintaining his family just like the children from the
poorest social class.
 Right in this period of Charles Dickens´ life his weakness for poor children probably took
root.
 The poor children were models for the future heroes in the majority of his writings.
 The thing is that the writer really experienced a similar way of life like them.
 He naturally felt very lonely, abandoned by the family and without the feeling of home.
 The life of young Charles Dickens was slowly getting better. In 1825 he was enrolled at
school again – at the Wellington House Academy. Although this school did not provide
quality education, Charles was immensely happy at it after the previous experience.
 Despite his great delight for the school attendance, new friends and hobbies, especially
in the form of various small animals, also numerous imperfections of the Wellington
House Academy stuck in Charles´ mind.
 The tuition at the school was shallow and inferior; the most of teachers were not able to
impose discipline among the boys, the classes were constantly interrupted by brutal
seizures of a choleric headmaster.
 Particularly this negative picture of the Wellington House Academy became a model of
the school institution of Mr. Creakle in the novel David Copperfield.
 Charles Dickens´ studies at the Wellington House Academy took two years. In year 1827
fifteen-year old Charles Dickens ended the school attendance and he started working
life.
 He launched his career as a junior clerk at the company Ellis and Blackmore, the law
office.
 In year 1831 nineteen-year old Charles Dickens gained a new job again. He became a
political journalist in the Chamber of Deputies.
 Charles liked this job more because he became a witness of miscellaneous parliamentary
disputes full of party propaganda.
 Later Charles Dickens gained the job of a reporter in the Morning Chronicle thanks to
that experience.
 In that time he started to cultivate his talent for writing, he drew up the first stories and
during the writing he was fully using his experience from the Chamber of Deputies.
 At the start anonymously and later under a pen name he published literary sketches and
he gained a reputation
 In the beginning of the year 1834 the first book by twenty-four-year old Charles Dickens,
Sketches by Boz, was published
 It noticed great success and it brought a contract with the publishing house Chapman
and Hall to Charles.
 This company published the second book by Charles Dickens called The Pickwick
Papers a few months later in the end of the year 1836
 The Pickwick Papers made the name of Charles Dickens truly popular. After that
phenomenal success Charles, overloaded with numerous publishing offers, decided to
quit the job of a reporter definitely and to dedicate his time fully to the writing career.
Personal life

 Charles Dickens met the first love when he was seventeen. Her name was Maria
Beadnell and she was a daughter of a bank director.
 Mister and madam Beadnell were trying to find appropriate marriage matches for their
two daughters; therefore they held various parties and celebrations in their house.
Primarily young men attended those parties.
 However in that time Charles Dickens worked as a mere court reporter at Doctors´
Common, therefore he did not seem to be a suitable candidate for marriage with Maria.
Maria´s parents sent her to Paris for studies in order to remove her out of Charles´ range
 After that unhappy experience it took other three years until Charles met a new girl.
Catherine Hogarth was a daughter of Charles´ superior, the editor in chief of the Evening
Chronicle, the evening paper.
 The wedding took place in 1836 in Chelsea.
 A happy marriage at first was unfortunately soon marked by an immense family tragedy.
The younger sister of Catherine Hogarth, Mary, who lived in the same household as the
young couple, all of a sudden and unexpectedly died at home right in Charles Dickens´
arms.
 Because of that tragedy Charles Dickens even did not met the deadline of handing in his
new novel Oliver Twist.
 He revived the memory of Mary in his writings; many female characters there were
abundant with the same personality traits as Mary had.
 Despite the incompatibility of their personalities the marriage of Charles and Catherine
Dickens lasted the long twenty-two years and they begot eleven children in total.
 Their relationship reached a critical point in the fifties of the 19th century.
 In that time the first huge intervention into the marriage was Charles ´reunion with an
old flame – Maria Beadnell.
 The second, much more serious intervention into the marriage of Charles and Catherine
was meeting a young actress.
 Her name was Ellen Ternan and that young woman absolutely enchanted Charles
Dickens.
 The married couple Charles and Catherine Dickens broke up definitively in year 1858.
Last Years

 Charles Dickens spent the last years of his life occupationally too.
 He started to pay more attention to public reading of his writings.
 Despite the failing state of health he even organized a tour of public reading in the
United States of America in year 1867. The tour was a great success, nonetheless Charles
Dickens returned to England with even more ruined health.
 As Charles´ state of health constantly worsened, the writer oftentimes thought about his
death.
 He still continued working on the last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. On 8th
of June 1870 exhausted Charles Dickens suddenly collapsed after a day full of work on
that novel and he never regained consciousness fully again.
 On the second day, 9th of June 1870, he died in his house in Gad´s Hill Place, in the
beloved country, surrounded by his work. The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained
the last, unfinished novel by Charles Dickens